by Jo Nesbo
“Faster, Nilly, we’re not going to make it! Think about those soooooft lips!”
And Nilly thought. He thought that if they didn’t manage this, he would probably never get to see Lisa or Doctor Proctor again. This thought made his intestines give one final effort and he pressed out a little more wind so they shot ahead with a little more speed. The spectators watching would talk about it for years afterwards – that they had been witness to the fantastic sprint in the Provence mountains at the 1969 Tour de France, when the legendary Eddy and his strange red-haired passenger, whose name no one could remember, had flown towards the finishing line as if they had a jet engine on their bike. Some even claimed that the bicycle had lifted off from the ground. Yes, a few even imagined that a strange white smoke had trailed from the seat of the trousers of the little boy on the bike seat. Even so, it had appeared hopeless, up until the final metres when they had managed to increase their speed a tiny bit more and at the finishing line they had beaten the yellow jersey by a gumillionth of a millimetre. It was the first victory for Eddy, who would go on to became the world-famous Eddy who would win bike races around the world, but who in his memoirs would say that it had been that win in Provence that had made him believe in himself and stick with cycling.
But all that was in the future (or the past, depending on how you looked at it). Right now (or then) Eddy and Nilly were revelling in their win. They were both lifted off the bike and carried by the cheering crowd over to the winner’s platform, where they were given a medal and each given a teddy bear and kissed on the cheek by soooft lips. Then someone thrust a microphone in their faces and Nilly immediately pushed his way forward.
“Hello,” he said. “Is this TV?”
“Yes,” said the woman behind the microphone. “Can you tell the French people who you actually are?”
“Certainly,” Nilly said. “Where’s the camera?”
“Over there,” the woman said, and pointed towards an enormous camera set up in the back of a nearby truck behind her.
Nilly looked directly into the camera and stood up straight.
“Hi there, people of France,” he said. “I’m Nilly, and I think you should make a note of that name. Especially if there’s anyone out there named Lisa or Doctor Proctor, I think they should pay attention now. I – Nilly, that is – am coming to you live from the top of a mountain named—”
“We know the name of the mountain,” the woman with the microphone said impatiently. “You entered the world of cycle racing like a comet, Muhsyuh Nilly, but have you come to stay?”
“No,” Nilly said. “Actually, I would like to get out of here as soon as possible, so if Lisa and Doctor Proctor could come and pick me up, I’ll be waiting at the top of . . . What mountain is this, actually?”
“Moe Bla,” Eddy whispered into his ear.
“Moe Bla!” Nilly shouted. “To be precise, I’ll be at the . . .”
“Hôtel Moe Bla,” Eddy whispered.
“Hôtel Moe Bla!” Nilly yelled.
“My buddy and I will be staying in the tower suite,” Eddy told the camera. “The winner always gets the tower suite. Hurry, Lisa and Doctor Proctor!”
WHEN THE INTERVIEW was over, they were whisked off for massages and a wonderful hot bath in the tower suite. A tailor came up to the room, took Nilly’s measurements, and shook his head, laughing, before disappearing again. When he returned a few hours later, he brought a suit and shirt and shoes that Nilly was told to wear to the victory dinner.
“Cool!” Nilly cried as he looked at himself in the mirror. “Will there be cancan dancing?”
Eddy laughed and shook his head exactly the way the tailor had. “The next stage starts tomorrow at eight a.m. sharp. I’m going to eat four French fries and then turn in for the night.”
“Party pooper!” Nilly complained, tap dancing in his new patent leather shoes so they clicked on the marble floor. “Let’s get this party started!”
The victory dinner was being held in the restaurant of the Hôtel Moe Bla. There were lots of people in fancy party clothes who wanted to shake Nilly’s hand, but there was no cancan content as far as he could tell. Some of the other cyclists came over to Nilly and asked him in a whisper about the powder they’d seen him take, wondering if they could buy some from him. They snarled “cheater!” when Nilly shook his head. Actually the whole thing was pretty boring. Nilly’s head was already nodding as he started dozing off during the first course. He eventually slid down in his seat, unnoticed, and disappeared out of sight under the edge of the table. Eddy discovered the sleeping Nilly. After three attempts to wake him, he slung Nilly over his shoulder and carried him up the stairs to the tower suite. There he placed Nilly in the bigger of the two beds and crawled into the smaller one himself. Then he yawned twice and turned off the lights.
NILLY WOKE UP and opened his eyes. A strip of sunlight was coming in through a gap in the curtains in the tower suite and shining right on his freckled face. He stretched and discovered that someone had put a teeny tiny yellow jersey on his nightstand. It said tour de france 1969 on it and next to it there was a note that said:
Good morning, Nilly! Thanks for your help. I didn’t want to wake you, so by the time you read this we’ll already be out riding the next stage. I hope Lisa and Doctor Proctor come soon.
Your friend always,
Eddy
Nilly stretched, feeling fit, like he was in great shape, but also, truth be told, like he could do with a little more sleep. He thought about it a little, yawned and closed his eyes again. And then he thought about breakfast. The second he thought about that, he heard the door open quietly and smelled the familiar scent of food. He smiled and dreamed of what types of delicious dishes were being wheeled in to him now. Yes, he didn’t even need to open his eyes to tell that it was a wheeled cart. He could hear the wheels squea king.
The squeaking wheels . . .
Nilly’s eyes shot open and he stared at the ceiling. He inhaled the scent of food again. It wasn’t bacon and eggs. It was . . . rotten meat and stinky socks.
He jumped in bed as the door slammed shut and the key turned. There, right in front of him, stood a tall person in a long, black trench coat with a wooden leg sticking out at the bottom.
The person’s red made-up lips were stretched into an unusually big grin that revealed those sharp, chalk-white teeth. In her hand she was holding a long-barrelled pistol that looked like it had been stolen from a museum. The person’s voice was as hoarse as a desert wind:
“Good morning, Nilly. Where is he? Where’s Doctor Proctor?”
“R-r-r . . .” Nilly said. “Ra-ra-ra . . .”
There was no doubt about it. His stutter was back.
The Bridge in Provence
LISA STOOD THERE in the bath with water dripping from her clothes, blinking the soap bubbles out of her eyelashes. She looked around. The first thing she discovered was that she was surrounded by tall, gloomy mountains that blocked out the sun. The second was that the bath was on a grassy ledge. The third was that right in front of her was a bridge, a steel bridge that was sooty and grey from age. The fourth was that she was completely alone. In other words, Nilly was nowhere to be seen.
“Nilly!” Lisa yelled.
“Nilly!” the echo replied, first from the side of one mountain, then another and then another.
She hopped out of the bath and walked over to the edge of the rocky ledge. A deep chasm plunged down between mountains, below her and the bridge.
“Nilly!”
“Nilly! Nilly! Nilly. . .” The echoes faded away.
“Hi!”
The “hi” had come from the bridge. Lisa shaded her eyes and felt a sense of hope well up in her when she glimpsed someone standing on the road by the end of the bridge waving to her. Maybe that was Nilly? Or Doctor Proctor?
“Hi!” Lisa yelled, waving back and starting to wade through grass down the hillside, heading over towards the road. As she walked, she heard something, the drone of a
n engine approaching. And she heard that the voice up ahead yelled something back. She stopped so she could hear better:
“Hurry up! They’re coming!”
The voice didn’t sound like Nilly’s or Doctor Proctor’s. It was a girl’s voice. Lisa heard the drone of the engine getting louder and instinctively understood that she should do what the girl said. So she did. She hurried. Lisa ran as fast as she could, as the sound of the engine got louder and louder. When Lisa reached the end of the bridge, she saw that the person was a girl a little younger than herself, with dark hair, brown eyes and a red poncho. The girl grabbed Lisa’s hand and pulled her down to hide in the ditch alongside the road just as a motorcycle came around the corner.
And it was a motorcycle Lisa recognised right away.
It had a sidecar, and the driver was tall and thin and wearing motorcycle goggles, a leather helmet and a most unusually long wool scarf that stretched straight out behind him and disappeared round the corner. And then, wouldn’t you know, the end of the scarf came round the corner too. A woman was hanging on to it, being pulled as if she was on water skis. The soles of her shoes were emitting black smoke, like from burning rubber. Lisa opened her mouth in disbelief. She knew what was going to happen!
And that was exactly what did happen too. Just much faster than Lisa had pictured it when Juliette had described it: the woman slid along the edge of the road, the scarf coiled round the sign post before the bridge, and partway across the bridge, the driver was yanked off his motorcycle as the scarf tightened round his neck. Meanwhile, the woman was spinning round the post in tighter and tighter circles. Sparks sprayed out from around the motorcycle as it slid over the bridge until it finally stopped and silence once again settled between the mountains.
“Juliette!” Lisa yelled to the woman, who had finally released the scarf and was obviously very dizzy after her carousel ride because she staggered out onto the bridge without paying any attention to Lisa’s yell.
“Juliette!” Lisa yelled and wanted to run after her. But the girl in the poncho held her back.
“He said we were supposed to stay here,” she said.
“Who said?” Lisa yelled, trying to pull herself free.
“Doctor Proctor,” the girl said.
Lisa stiffened. “Doctor Proctor was here?”
“Yes,” the girl said. “He said that we had to let what happened happen. That trying to stop it could ruin his other plans. Duck, here come the hippos!”
It wasn’t until she heard the word “hippo” that Lisa noticed the sound of another engine and knew that they were coming, just as Juliette had described. And sure enough, the black limousine came round the corner. It drove cautiously onto the bridge, which was only just barely wide enough.
Lisa remained crouched and watched the woman out on the bridge pull the man onto his feet.
“He’s going to get on his motorcycle soon and drive off towards Italy,” Lisa whispered. “And she’ll turn herself over to the hippos, who will take her back to Claude Cliché in Paris. Whom she’ll have to marry.”
“I know,” the girl said, and as Lisa stared at her, wondering how she knew all that, the girl continued: “The professor told me. What time did you come from?”
“The same as Doctor Proctor. How did you know that I’d time-travelled?”
“I saw the bath. What’s your name?”
“Lisa. Lisa Pedersen. I’m here to find Doctor Proctor. Did you time-travel here too?”
The girl laughed and shook her head. “I’m just from here and now. My name’s Anna. Anna Showli.”
“How funny,” Lisa said. “My best friend’s name is Anna, too. She lives in Sarpsborg. In Norway. My parents think I’m there visiting her now.” Lisa felt her eyes suddenly well up at the thought of her mother and father.
Anna smiled and patted Lisa comfortingly on the cheek, even though Anna looked like she must be at least a year younger than Lisa. On the other hand, if Lisa ever got back to her own time and met Anna then, Anna would be at least as old as her mother.
“Are you alone?” Anna asked.
“So it would seem,” Lisa said. “I’m guessing Nilly forgot where we were going. Occasionally he has trouble concentrating.”
The motorcycle out on the bridge started up and drove away.
“Hey!” Lisa yelled, standing up. “Doctor Proctor! D on’t go!”
“Shh,” Anna said, pulling Lisa back down. “That’s the young Doctor Proctor. He wouldn’t have had any idea what you were talking about.”
“Huh?” Lisa said. “What happened to the old Doctor Proctor, then?”
Anna sighed. “He left again.”
“But he was here? You met him?”
Anna nodded. “He strolled into Innebrède this morning, wet as a pair of swimming trunks. He came over to me, because the Trann cousins had tossed me into Innebrède Creek yet again.”
“The Trann cousins?”
“These two awful boys who live down at the bottom of my street. They had knocked over my bike, dumped out my backpack and filled my pockets with nails. They’re training to be hippos like their fathers, you see.”
“I see,” Lisa sighed.
“Well, I guess his crazy appearance scared them. At least that’s what I assume. Plus, he was shouting at them in a foreign language and shaking his fist. The Trann boys ran off, but yelled to me that they were going to go get their fathers. Then the professor helped me gather my books and school things. And when he saw that I had a big magic marker, he asked if he could borrow it to write a message on the wall at the petrol station.”
“A message?”
“Yeah. He wanted to warn himself, he said. He was going to write a note telling himself not to stop there, to keep going until he got to Italy. He told me the whole story.”
“And you believed him?” Lisa asked, surprised.
“No, no,” Anna laughed. “I thought he was a nice, but very crazy, professor. Even though he showed me the bath that he claimed he could travel through time in. It was in with all the junk cars in the Hippo’s scrap-metal yard. Then I heard the bell ringing at school off in the distance and explained to him how to get to the petrol station without running into the Trann fathers. Then I ran off so I wouldn’t be late for school.”
“I see,” Lisa said. “So, why aren’t you at school now?”
“I never made it that far. When I came round the corner, the Trann fathers were there waiting for me. They shook me and asked me who he was, that crazy foreigner who’d threatened those dear, sweet boys of theirs. I was so scared, I told them everything. They made such strange faces when I told them about the young professor who was running away with Juliette Margarine by motorcycle. They said something about how that must be the guy their boss, Mr Cliché, was looking for. They asked if I knew where the foreigner was, but I pretended I didn’t know. Then they let me go and started discussing something between themselves. They agreed to warn the other hippos in the village to keep a lookout for suspicious foreigners. And decided it probably made sense to give the petrol station a heads-up since that was usually where any foreigners coming to Innebrède went. Then they jumped into their limousine and drove away.”
“What did you do?”
“I realised right away that maybe there was something to the professor’s story after all. So, I ran as fast as I could in the same direction I’d told the professor to go. Moan dyoo, how I ran! Luckily I found him hiding across from the petrol station. I told him what had happened. We watched from his hiding place and saw that the limousine was there already and that the Trann fathers were talking to the two hippos who work at the petrol station.”
“That explains why they were so suspicious when Proctor and Juliette stopped for petrol,” Lisa said.
Anna’s eyes welled up. “It’s all my fault, isn’t it?”
“Not at all,” Lisa said, and now she was the one patting Anna’s cheek. “There’s no way you could have known that Doctor Proctor isn’t completely insane. To t
ell the truth, sometimes I wonder myself. . .”
Anna dried away her tears. “The professor said that his plan had failed, that he had to come up with something else.”
“Did he say what?” Lisa asked.
“He said you only get one chance to change something in history, so now he had to go to another time and change something there.”
“Where?” Lisa asked. “Where?”
“He said he had a brilliant idea.”
“What idea?” Lisa shouted.
“Duck!” Anna said.
The wide limousine had backed up off the bridge and was now turning round right in front of them. Lisa cautiously peeked over the edge of the ditch and caught a glimpse of a pale face inside, behind the dark tinted windows. It was Juliette. Then the limo accelerated and disappeared in a cloud of dust.
“What kind of idea?” Lisa repeated, coughing.
“The professor wanted to travel back in time to see the engineer who designed this bridge in front of us. To before he made it. To get him to change the drawings.”
“Change the bridge? Why?”
“Because the limousine that the hippos use is exactly as wide as the American tanks that rolled across the bridge here to liberate France from Hitler during World War Two. You said it yourself that the limousine only just barely fitted onto the bridge, right?”
“Yeah,” Lisa said.
“Well, the professor said that if he could just get the engineer to draw the bridge a tiny bit narrower in 1888, then the limousine wouldn’t fit and the hippos would have to give up and stop chasing him and Juliette. And they could just chug along on their way. And live happily ever after . . .”
“Brilliant!” Lisa exclaimed. “How clever! But . . . but how did he know who the engineer was and what year he drew the plans?”
“Simple! It’s on that sign right there.” Anna pointed and the two girls got up out of the ditch and went over to the sign that the scarf had been caught on.
“Designed by engineer Gustave Eiffel in 1888,” Lisa read. “Completed in 1894. Wait! Eiffel? Isn’t he the guy who designed—”